Tutorial: How to Make Nasty Filtered Bass in Massive & Ableton

With Vespers

Important Notice(s)

1) Listen on proper monitors or headphones.

2) You will likely piss off your neighbors while watching this tutorial. Vespers, and his affiliates, agents, successors and assigns assume no responsibility for noise violation fines, structural damage, or moving expenses due to forced relocation from excessive amount of bass.

3) Don’t fucking put lipstick on a mutherfucking pig. Don’t do it.

In this tutorial we cover a Zen approach to bass sound design in Native Instruments Massive using Ableton Live as the host. We start with a single saw wave oscillator, then fatten up the sound using unisono, pitch detuning and pan spread. Then we set Massive to respond to pitchbend data and program our clip envelope in Ableton to send pitch bends to the synth. Next we set up bandpass and daft filters, using low resonance, and frequency cutoffs offset from each other, and automate the filters using Massive’s Macro function and Ableton’s track automation in Arrangement View.

Once we have the sound ripe and fat, we move on to applying effects such as brauner tube saturation to add in harmonic distortion, chorus to widen the sound further, EQ to shave off some highs and boost some mid-highs, hard clipper and bit crusher to add some nastiness and crunch, and a little coup de gras with filter feedback into the bandpass filter.

To beef up the sub-bass end of the patch, we group Massive into an Instrument Rack and add another instance of Massive. We use a sine wave this time and throw a little classic tube on it for some low end harmonics, then EQ out the mids and highs. We set it to respond to pitchbend in an identical way to the top patch and voila!